Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently posted about an interesting little flash game entitled Upgrade Complete. It’s a simple shmup where the aim is to blast everything onscreen to hell, collect money to upgrade and keep on killing. The difference here is that you use the money to upgrade everything, and I mean everything. The main menu only has two buttons until you buy more. Like how it appears in the screenshot? That’s the final upgrade of the graphics engine. You even have to buy the music and the mute button seperately.
It’s a bizarre game that’s ultimately varied in the satisfaction the player feels from it, which I can only really equate to playing ‘Ginormo Sword’. Simply put, the game itself is pretty boring as the enemies don’t fight back at all, and the only real measure of entertainment comes from just how much you enjoy a persistent upgradable experience. There is something so curiously brilliant about the way everything slowly builds together around your gameplay. Customising your ship with lightning cannons and missle launchers as well as upgrading each one to launch volleys of firepower in seconds is quite a lot of fun even though there is no real grand goal and each level features no great challenge to overcome. It is a game that completely depends on your own involvement to turn it into something above your initial perceptions.
Something worth playing if only to discuss why the hell it’s worth playing then…